About the Blog

I will post a new entry every few weeks. Some will be new writing and some will be past work that has relevance today. The writing will deal in some way with the themes that have been part of my teaching and writing life for decades:

•teaching and learning;•educational opportunity;•the importance of public education in a democracy;•definitions of intelligence and the many manifestations of intelligence in school, work, and everyday life; and•the creation of a robust and humane philosophy of education.

If I had to sum up the philosophical thread that runs through my work, it would be this: A deep belief in the ability of the common person, a commitment to educational, occupational, and cultural opportunity to develop that ability, and an affirmation of public institutions and the public sphere as vehicles for nurturing and expressing that ability.

My hope is that this blog will foster an online community that brings people together to continue the discussion.

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Tuesday, February 4, 2014

The
New Press has just issued Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us
in paperback, and I used the occasion to significantly revise the original. As
with the original, the new edition offers, to the best of my ability, a
humanistic and democratic rationale for education in America, K–12 though
college and adult school—a different vision than that in reigning technocratic,
economistic education policy. I added treatment of Race to the Top, Common Core
State Standards, and the increased role of business in school policy. I also wrote
new chapters on currently popular character education, on Massive Open Online
Courses (MOOCs) and other expansions of on-line learning, and on poverty and
adult education. I conclude with some thoughts and tips on writing about
school.

I
print below the Preface and Table of Contents:

Why School? comes from a professional
lifetime in classrooms, creating and running educational programs, teaching and
researching, writing and thinking about education and human development. It
offers a series of appeals for big-hearted social policy and an embrace of the
ideals of democratic education—from the way we define and structure opportunity
to the way we respond to a child adding a column of numbers. Collectively, the
chapters provide a bountiful vision of human potential, illustrated through the
schoolhouse, the workplace, and the community.

We
need such appeals, I think, because we have lost our way.

We
live in an anxious age and seek our grounding, our assurances in ways that
don’t satisfy our longing—that, in fact, make things worse. We’ve lost hope in
the public sphere and grab at market-based and private solutions, which
undercut the sharing of obligation and risk and keep us scrambling for
individual advantage. Though we pride ourselves as a nation of opportunity and
a second chance, our social policies can be terribly ungenerous. As we try to
improve our schools, we rush to one-dimensional solutions, to technological and
structural “game changers” that all too often lead to new problems. We’ve
narrowed the purpose of schooling to economic competitiveness, our kids
becoming economic indicators. And we’ve reduced our definition of human
development and achievement—that miraculous growth of intelligence,
sensibility, and the discovery of the world—to a test score.

Historically,
national discussions about education have always had a political dimension to
them and often have been contentious. But the current debates are so
politicized and combative that positions easily get simplified and hardened,
and nuance and possible areas of agreement are lost in the fiery polemics. We
as a country and, certainly, the children in our schools, deserve better. Why School? was written in the midst of
these debates and to be sure exhibits a point of view, but I hope that the book
can contribute in some small way to a different kind of discussion of why we
educate in America.

Preface

Introduction: Why School?

1.In Search of a Fresh Language of Schooling

2.Finding Our Way: The Experience of Education

3.No Child
Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Spirit of Democratic Education

4.Business Goes to School

5.Intelligence in the Workplace and the
Schoolhouse

6.On Values, Work, and Opportunity

7.Being Careful about Character

8.Reflections on Standards, Teaching, and Learning

9.MOOCs and Other Wonders: Education and High-Tech
Utopia

10.Re-Mediating
Remediation

11.Soldiers
in the Classroom

12.The
Inner Life of the Poor

13.Finding
the Public Good through the Details of Classroom Life

Conclusion: The Journey Back and
Forward

Afterword: Writing About School

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1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

I agree with what you're saying about how students are pretty much being manipulated and taken advantage of while they're trying to get an education in the United States. I think college administrators and the education bureau have increased wages for classes and room and board, purposefully knowing circumstances for certain students, especially in this economy. I do not agree with it, and I think it's unfair that education in the United States, is like a secret private investment, and not much of a right, anymore. The fact that they do this to young adults in the US, to me, is sickening and wrong. If education doesn’t improve over time, financially, I think the drop in college students will increase, because logically speaking a job to support yourself and put food on your plate with a roof over your head, is going to be more of anyone’s priority than school.